Software for managing a virtualized data center is responsible for monitoring physical hosts and virtual machines (VMs) running in the physical hosts and, further, for performing management operations such as provisioning and configuration tasks. One example of such management software is vSphere™ by VMware of Palo Alto, Calif. The complete set of hosts, VMs, data storage elements (datastores), networks, and the organization of these elements into data centers, clusters, and resource pools, managed by such software, is commonly referred to as a virtualized computer inventory (hereinafter referred to as the “inventory”).
Under certain circumstances, migration or reconstruction of an inventory may be desired or needed. For example, when a given cluster and the settings associated therewith have been tested in development and are ready to be moved into production, the production inventory is reconstructed from the development inventory. To give another example, an existing inventory that works well for a data center or across multiple data centers may be replicated by administrators for use with different data centers.
Conventional methods that have been used to perform inventory migrations or reconstructions include archiving the inventory database and replicating the archived inventory database for use in a different environment. These methods, however, have several drawbacks. For example, in vSphere™, when a management server is connected to the archived inventory database, all hosts in the inventory are initialized in a disconnected state and must be explicitly added by the administrator, which is tedious and time-consuming. Another limitation of the conventional methods is that partial migration or reconstruction is not permitted. There is no way for an administrator using the conventional methods to migrate or reconstruct a sub-portion of the inventory.